[A]She had never seen rain before.

  A sve only got a sanitizing cloth with their rations. It was very effective, but she had never heard of anyone that preferred it. Water was scarce though and needed to be conserved. Especially on a ship small enough to need sves. Automated systems were always bulkier than another bunk. She had used water once, back when she had been very young and living on a station.

  Before she had been sold.

  It had felt nice, as far as she remembered. Though it hadn’t been much different to the cloths, other than taking her fur longer to dry. It didn’t clean as quickly either and the water needed to be gotten rid of in a special way, even if she didn’t remember exactly how.

  She was sure it had been nothing like the rain.

  She had heard stories about being on a pnet’s surface. How the weather could be different, changing seemingly at a whim. She had thought water just falling from the sky to be absurd, a strange fantasy of people stuck on a ship for too long.

  The female giant didn’t seem to care much for the difference between reality and fantasy.

  She had been so shocked to see water falling that she had even forgotten where she was and how she had gotten there. Stepping into the rain had been an afterthought, something she had done without a reason. When the giant had spoken and told her to rub slowly and shown her the cleanser, she had been spooked out of her awe.

  Of course she wasn’t there to enjoy herself.

  Getting enough cleanser for her tail and cleaning herself thoroughly, she still enjoyed the warmth pouring down on her. It wasn’t strange for a sve to need a deep clean when switching employers. It would be a disaster to bring a sickness onto a ship with limited supplies and cking medical care. Most flyers spent the time and resources to cleanse themselves every time they left a station. Staying off the ship and doing a cleanse before leaving kept things pretty safe. Off ship housing was expensive though, so sves rarely left the ship at all unless something was happening to the ship, or they had been traded or sold off.

  This wasn’t the first time she had been sold. Even if it hadn’t happened much, she should have still expected this to be the first thing to do. Especially after she had messed her….

  She stopped that thought, pink tingeing her cheeks.

  The two giants had thrown her thoughts into disarray. Whatever the male giant had done had confused her so badly that she hadn’t known what to expect and the female giant didn’t seem to make much sense at all. Even though she was the only one to speak.

  It would have been nice to get her suit back though.

  She didn’t know what the female giant had done with it, but she wasn’t used to being unclothed for so long. Cleaning it would be difficult, but with this rain she could do two things at once. Though it was the ck of a colr around her neck that made her feel truly naked. She had struggled with herself about whether she should have kept it. She didn’t know why the male giant had broken it, nor what his goal was, so it was best to just leave it in the overly rge medical bay for now. With so many unknowns and no way to carry it, it was probably just fine where it was.

  The only worry she had being naked was if her new master was cruel enough to make her clean without protection. Most delicate equipment needed cleaners or other things that were harsh to flesh. The fur on her hands was a patchwork of muted colors due to spills and mishaps. It had been even worse when the liquids had touched her skin. She didn’t want to feel that kind of itching burn anywhere but her hands.

  Though maybe once in a while, if she got to use the rain again.

  The blow drying helped to speed up a process she remembered taking a long time, meaning she could get back to work quickly. With no idea what her job was and having not seen anyone else, she kept following the female giant. That was who she had been told to follow, so that was what she did.

  The female giant led her to a rge room, clearly an officer’s quarters from the way it was id out. She had seen her share of high-ranking rooms, being the one that was called to clean them due to the other sves not being trusted around delicate equipment. Not that most of those rooms had delicate equipment. It was always normal messes she had been called to clean. A waste of her time and it always meant some kind of pain, so she hated going there.

  It didn’t seem like she had any more choice here though.

  “Moose ir. Dark good, sleep. Quiet pce.”

  ‘What is a moose?’

  This room at least had some differences. The absolute mess on the floor for one. Not that she could really make it out. This whole area had been dim. Not dim enough to be blinding, but it would take a long time to get used to these levels of light. This room was nearly pitch bck. She could see the shapes around the room of personal storage and what seemed like a bunk, as well as the mess on the floor, but detail was lost to the gloom.

  The female giant was very literal when she said it was dark.

  Dark and quiet.

  She watched the shape of the female giant borrow into the mess on the floor. It took her a moment to figure out that the mess must have been a sleeping area. A look at the bunk showed it would be very uncomfortable for the female and nearly impossible for the male to sleep there, as it was nestled between cabinets.

  ‘It seems this is where I will be staying for now.’

  It didn’t look like the female giant was all that interested in taking her to someone else that may give orders and the male giant wasn’t here, having not followed them.

  ‘Did I follow the wrong one?’

  Very aware of the noise her cws made on the floor, she walked as quietly as she could to the sleeping area. Until she got other orders, she would keep following the st one. She didn’t know if she could follow the female giant into sleep, but she could at least rest.

  She had learned a long time ago not to pass up a chance to do nothing.

  [B]‘I need some scissors.’

  He idly pressed the forward thrust button until the asteroid was even with the reticle, then cancelled out the momentum with a reverse thrust. Not that it mattered. The collection drones didn’t need the ship to be in a specific spot, just close enough to make the trip. He liked to move the ship when he could though. Getting practice manually moving something this rge was bound to come in handy eventually. It meant he could scoop the smallest asteroids himself as well.

  Which was much faster, even if the ship compined about possible collisions.

  Absently scritching the head that appeared under his other hand, he watched the drones dismantling the rger chunks of the rock that they couldn’t fit through the collection area on the ship. Reading the information on the panel before him was still out of his reach, but he had managed to identify which parts were the ‘elements’ found in the asteroid. It was probably a breakdown of the ore or alloys in the rock, but it gave him an idea of what the colors on the panel meant.

  It seemed blue was something needed or used by the ship, red was sg or waste rock and orange and purple were… something. He was pretty set on them having to do with value, but what exactly they depicted he wasn’t sure. His current pn was to use purple as high value, just because of the whole royalty dye thing. It didn’t really matter in the end, since he couldn’t communicate what he had or what he wanted for it, but it gave his practice more meaning.

  ‘I can deal with long hair I guess. The ends curling is annoying, but not a huge thing. It’s the beard that is quickly leaving behind caveman and approaching ‘living thing actively trying to choke me’ that is the problem.’

  He gnced at the progress bar, that he was currently attempting to work out the purpose of, go up. It sted after the rock was gone, so not a collection progress. His best guesses were either refining or internal movement of whatever was collected. Both were good to know.

  He had yet to experience any difference between FTL and normal space. That meant he could probably rule out dimension hoping and wormhole travel. There didn’t seem to be any instant movement or change of location. Folding space was still a possibility, he supposed, but it was probably a more mundane method. Either simply ignoring lightspeed limitations somehow or a gravity wave type of device. That or something really exotic that he simply didn’t have reference for.

  The drones finished up with the rock he had targeted. He had found this one that seemed to have a lot of water ice and what he was pretty sure was elemental gold. At least that was what he got from the dispy, alongside the other incomprehensible bits. Water seemed to be the thing that got ‘used up’ according to the readouts, probably for either power or non-FTL propulsion. Maybe both.

  That was both good and bad, as far as he was concerned. It meant they wouldn’t run out if they stayed still, but they couldn’t go find more if they ran out. It was something he was keeping a very close eye on.

  Once the drones fshed a pop-up that he was treating as an all clear, he started maneuvering the ship back towards the direction he had pnned out.

  ‘I sure hope it’s the next one. If someone had told me that I would be worried about running out of stars, I would have ughed at them. Or demanded to know how I got into a spaceship in the first pce. Hmm, no, yea, definitely the second one first.’

  It didn’t take him long to get the ship pointed in the right direction, then it was just waiting for the progress bar to finish. It was probably fine to jump now, the ship had never sent up a compint and probably would do whatever automated things it had to regardless, but he liked to be extra careful. Seeing as they cked a mechanic. Or just anyone fluent in the nguages. Or really any part of the hundreds of crew he expected would be needed for a ship this size. The robots help immensely, but he didn’t kid himself into thinking that was a long-term solution.

  His practice did give him plenty of time to think. He even managed to get some things transted while he was waiting a few times. His navigation pn was also something he had come up with while he was sitting here watching the ship do its thing.

  He didn’t know where their newest passenger’s friends had gotten off to. They likely could read their map and just jumped straight to wherever the help was. He had just assumed that they went in the direction they had been facing, seeing as how there had been less than an hour and no real reason to do any kind of crazy maneuvering. He took the heading of his ship and plotted out all the stars that were in an absolutely straight line. That had probably been a mistake, a little divergence likely wouldn’t matter to the FTL drive, but it was the only way to narrow the possibilities. Once he had jump data for all of them, he had stuck the first one in the flight computer and off they went.

  That had been several stars ago and the jumps weren’t quick.

  On the plus side, that did at least give the girl a chance to not cower at every little movement. He didn’t really bme her, when everyone around you could seriously injure you by not looking where they are sitting, he would cower a bit too. The girl barely came up to his hips and that was only if she was really trying. His paranoia of being turned into a giant had resurfaced hard once the dust had settled. Though that did raise questions of why Kitty was so much bigger than the other girl.

  As his scritching fingers brushed an ear that flicked away, his mind stuttered a bit.

  ‘Wait, wha….’

  Looking down he spotted the tiny girl in question. She had a complicated look on her face and ruffled hair on her head.

  ‘Crap. Has she been here the whole time? I thought that it was Kitty being strange again. I am going to have to find a way to apologize.’